SWTOR: Neue Flashpoints, neuer Planet, weitere Operationen, Legacy-System - James Ohlen im Interview über die ersten beiden Game Updates für SWTOR

James Ohlen, Game Director für Star Wars: The Old Republic
buffed.de: The continuation of the operation Karagga's Palance features five bosses. Can you give us some details about the boss mechanics?

James Ohlen: I don't want to give away too much. But I can say that the end boss is really cool and very unusual. I think players are going to be surprised when they find out what the endboss is. We have revealed a teaser, but I'm not sure if the players already completely figured out what that picture meant. But let's just say that the final boss is actually a Hutt – and you're probably wondering »How can you fight a Hutt? After all, Hutts are just big, fat slugs. Shouldn't you just stick a lightsaber in it and be done?« But we've actually made a Hutt that's quite dangerous – but you'll have to play Karagga's Palace to see why.

buffed.de: You're also introducing a new flashpoint in 1.1 although some of the current flashpoints – Hammer Station for example – are still missing their hard mode option. Are those going to be implemented at some point?

James Ohlen: We are in the process of doing hard modes for all flashpoints. That should be coming soon – either in the March patch or the patch after that. But for now we felt players probably wanted brand new stuff rather than going back and doing hard modes of some of the flashpoints they've already done. So we focused our efforts on expanding Karagga's Palace and giving them Rise of the Rakghouls.

Rise of the Rakghouls is pretty epic. It's actually a two-part flashpoint. The first part is in our Game Update 1. And then in Game Update 2 in March Rise of the Rakghouls part 2 comes out. It's actually very story-heavy, you get to make lots of choices, particularly light side and dark side choices. I think players are really going to enjoy this, especially players who liked the flashpoints that dealt with what happened to Revan after Knights of the Old Republic and the flashpoints that dealt with Darth Malgus at the very end of the game and obviously the very first flashpoints you went through. Fans of those are going to enjoy Rise of the Rakghouls.

buffed.de: While we're on the subject of story-heavy flashpoints – we had the impression that Esseles and Black Talon in particular offer much more story and player choices than some of the later flashpoints.

SWTOR: Bilder aus Game Update 1 - "Rise of the Rakghouls" (2) James Ohlen: We have two different types of flashpoints – story-heavy flashpoints and story-light flashpoints. The Esseles for example is a story-heavy flashpoint, Hammer Station is a story-light flashpoint, the two-part Revan flashpoint is a story-heavy flashpoint, then we have some more story-light flashpoints, then the Darth Malgus flashpoint. We know that in terms of innovation and giving players something they've never seen before the story-heavy flashpoints are obviously what players are really excited about. That's why Rise of the Rakghouls is going down that path.

The reason why we do story-light flashpoints is because it allows us to give players something they can go through often without as much story. Sometimes players like to play a flashpoint over and over again to get their items or to fight the boss monsters. Players have different takes on the game. Some players really like the story-heavy flashpoints, others enjoy the story-light ones, so we're going to continue to mix it up.

buffed.de: So the story-light flashpoints were done on purpose and not a result of development time running out?

James Ohlen: Yes. But to be blunt – we obviously can produce more story-light flashpoints, they are less expensive. So, for example, if we're going to produce a story-heavy flashpoint, we could probably produce two story-light flashpoints in the same time span. But we know we have a huge group of fans who want the story-heavy flashpoints, so we're going to continue to give them more of those throughout 2012.

buffed.de: One last question regarding the old flashpoints. Why aren't all the hard modes in the game at launch? Wasn't there enough time or did you leave some of them out on purpose?

James Ohlen: Just time.

buffed.de: Game Update 1 introduces the new planet Kaon. Is that planet just part of the flashpoint, or is it a real planet with gameplay outside of the flashpoint as well?

James Ohlen: It's specifically for the flashpoint – so you go there just for the flashpoint. For now anyways. However, we are going to introduce a new world where we have more stuff, but that's for our Game Update 2 in March.

buffed.de: Oh, can you give us any details on that?

James Ohlen: So, in Game Update 2 we have a planet called Denova, and that's going to include a brand new Operation, a brand new Warzone – and we're also introducing level 50 single player content in Game Update 2. In addition to that we will most likely have another space game mission, and we're introducing the full legacy system, guild banks and PvP ranking.

With the first Game Update we want to show players that we're serious about supporting the game. With Game Update 2 in March we want to blow our fans away with just how much content they're going to be getting with every single update.

buffed.de: Will that single player content you mentioned expand the class storylines, or will it be a more general storyline for all classes?

James Ohlen: It's probably going to be general story for all classes.

   

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buffed.de: From future game updates back to the current state of the game – there still are bugs in the game, and it looks like patch 1.1 is also supposed to be a major bugfixing patch.

James Ohlen: That's true. Our budgeting plan is to continue to release patches every week. We skipped the last one to prepare for 1.1.

buffed.de: We're at 1.0.2 right now, correct?

James Ohlen: We've done 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 so far. Now we have 1.1, and then we'll have 1.1.1 and 1.1.2 and 1.1.3 and so forth. So we're going to continue to do the weekly patches for bugfixes, tweaks, balance changes, getting rid of exploits. What we focus on for these weekly updates are the highest priority bugs that are really annoying players in a major way.

In addition to that we have our Game Updates in which we address things concerning the polish of the game. We go through the game and we do a whole bunch of small adjustments, small changes and tweaks to basically increase the overall polish of the game. And we're going to continue to do that as we develop the game.

The thing about Star Wars: The Old Republic is that unlike other online games, where they shrink the team after launch or move on to a new project, we kept the entire team focused on continuing to build new content, optimize the code, fix bugs – and that's the plan for the rest of the year.

buffed.de: While we're talking about bugs – could you maybe tell us what the three most annoying bugs have been that players reported?

SWTOR: Bilder aus Game Update 1 - "Rise of the Rakghouls" (4) James Ohlen: That depends – we obviously fix the top three as fast as possible. (laughs) Our live guys basically have like a "top five bugs" list, and we basically go through those and determine how we're going to fix them. Right now for the PvP players there's concern about a little big of laginess to the controls that can occur when Warzones get really crazy. So we had our combat team really focused on essentially making sure that the game feels very responsive in the high action Warzone scenarios. So that has been a big focus.

There have also been some companion character bugs within the storylines, so we've been making sure to fix those bugs. Those are two important aspects I can think of from the top of my head. We're also continuing to work on the auction house. There have been some issues with auction house functionality. I think fans of the trade market will be happy with how we're improving that system.

There are a lot of different things we're working on. Some of them are bugs. Some of them are what we like to call "quality of life" features. Some are for balance. And sometimes we find exploits – the slicing exploit obviously was one that got a lot of attention.

buffed.de: We also asked around to find out what bugs are annoying our team and other players the most. People mentioned a couple of hard mode bosses that can sometimes oneshot characters, two daily quests on Ilum can't be completed, characters sometimes vanish from the guild list. But none of those bugs seem to be mentioned in the patch notes for 1.1. Are they already on your list?

James Ohlen: For some bugs it takes a while to track down what exactly is causing them. But all of the things you mentioned are known issues. The balancing problems of characters being killed instantly is a known issue. We also haven't gotten the patch notes down to be 100% accurate. So it's possible that a bug fix will go in without being in the patch notes. I'm not saying that's the case here, I'm just saying that it could be and I will check up on that. Obviously the flashpoint issue where you might use a container and don't get the loot, that was an issue that we rose to the top right away. The bugs with the daily quests are something I'm not super familiar with. So maybe I should check up on that one. (laughs)

Another thing actually is that sometimes a rumor will start in the community and then become the truth. And when we track it down we find out that it actually isn't happening. That hasn't happened too many times, but we have been on a few wild goose chases where we got the whole live team in emergency mode trying to track something down after the community has been all up in arms about it – and then we find out that it actually doesn't exist. Not too often, but sometimes.

buffed.de: Players are also discussing which features they would like to see added to the game. One feature that is mentioned often is some kind of dungeon finder functionality. Are you planning to add something along those lines?

James Ohlen: Eventually we're going to have something like a dungeon finder. But we feel it's not a priority right now. According to our data the percentage of players grouping up and doing Flashpoints and Operations is very high. Players are easily able to group up, they're able to find people to do Flashpoints, heroics and Operations. So it hasn't become an issue for us. I think it's a kind of feature you probably want when your game is a little bit older, when a much bigger percentage of your population is at the late game – but right now players are still doing the level-up game, they're easily able to find their groups. So, yes, we are going to have a feature like that. But no, it's not going to come soon.

buffed.de: And what about some kind of realm pools especially for PvP?

James Ohlen: Cross server queuing? That's something we already have people looking at. It's a really big feature, it's not going to come in for January or March, but it's something we have as a very high priority. Essentially it's the highest priority PvP feature that we have. But it's not going to be the first one we're going to do because it's one of the hardest ones, so some of the other features are going to come earlier. The PvP ranking for example is going to come in March.

buffed.de: The patch notes state that you will be making changes to Ilum. Will that affect the world pvp area or just the rest?

James Ohlen: The open world on Ilum is something that we're still working on and making adjustments to. It's definitely the PvP area that we have to do the most work on in terms of balance – and that's simply because it is open world. Open world PvP is always much more difficult to get balanced than the actual Warzones.

buffed.de: Probably especially on servers with a faction imbalance. By the way – can you give away any numbers regarding the two factions and the player base? Are players leaning towards the Imperial side? Because that's our impression.

James Ohlen: It depends on what shard you're on. Some have more Republic than Imperial, some more Imperial than Republic. Overall I think we have an Empire bias right now, which is a little weird and surprising – I wouldn't have thought that. But I guess people just like Darth Vader and the Empire more than they like Skywalker and the Republic. In World of Warcraft there was always more Alliance than Horde – but I guess Star Wars fans are more attracted to the dark side. (laughs)

But the legacy system coming in March and we really feel that that's going to appeal to people who like to play alts. I think it's actually going to encourage players to play alts. Because you can have a family member who's on a different side you can have your main character be an Imperial character and then you can make a legacy family member who's a Republic character. So it might actually encourage more players to play alts, and hopefully we might get some of that imbalance across servers to change just by encouraging players to roll an alt on the other side and try that out.

buffed.de: Will there be additional features to the legacy system?

James Ohlen: In March we're unveiling the majority of the legacy system. You're going to be able to create your own legacy family tree. You're going to be able to get legacy abilities, like perks. You're going to be getting legacy experience points through activities that any of your legacy characters do – and those will give you legacy levels. When you get a new legacy level, it will unlock the ability to get legacy abilities. There's also bind on legacy items.

The whole system is a huge system. We want to add that family dynamic to Star Wars. Obviously the Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker relationship is one of the most famous in cinema, so that's kind of what that system was inspired by. That's what we're doing for legacy.

buffed.de: Thank you very much for your time.

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